Tears blinded me, the tears I promised would never fall, but it did not matter. I did not need to see, I could feel him, and my tears fell on him. I tried to speak but my throat was choked up. “Oh!” I moaned, grasping at him, holding him tight so he could not leave me again ever. I was too happy to smile, too stunned, too dazed.

He took my cheeks in his hands his eyes searching mine and kissed me, a kiss I wished would last for all eternity.

He was home, I was home.

My eyes blinked open to the artificial light of my bunk and I moaned, burying my head in my pillow. The same dream had haunted me since his death. Why wouldn’t he let me forget, why couldn’t I give up on him? It was torture waking up and feeling it all over again, my wounds reopening. Would I never heal? Is this my life without him, hurt and pain?

Sometimes I wished I had never met him. I could have been without this hollow, empty feeling, the feeling that I would never have cause to smile again. But my time with him had been the best of my life. What was it they said? Better to have loved and lost… Well it didn’t feel better at the moment. I just needed him to hold me, to make me smile like he used to. Tears burnt in the back of my throat but I fought them away. I would not give in to my sorrow.

“Zoë! Where the hell are you?” Mal’s voice crackled across the comm causing me to leap from my bed. Our bed a voice whispered. Too big now, too empty.

~

I stared up at the white washed ceiling. “How long have I been here?”

The man was hesitant in answering but eventually he spluttered a response. “3 months.”

“Ta ma duh,” I breathed. How could this be possible?

“Do you remember what happened?”

I turned to the man in the bed next to mine. We wore the same white gown and lay in the same white bed in the same white hospital ward. Everything was so white. Blank.

“No,” I lied quickly.

“What nothing?” Nothing would have been a blessing. Nothing would be like the white walls, the white sheets, just blank.

I turned away from the man. For the first time I could not offer a smile, not offer a quick response to lighten the mood.

The odd thing was I didn’t hurt like I should. Perhaps it was the drugs I had been given or maybe in the time I had been here, breathing but shrouded in darkness, I had healed so beneath these bandages only shadows of scars remained. I wished I had the pain, I wished I had something to divert my attention from what I was feeling inside. I tried to push it back but it kept rearing its ugly head. One sound filled my mind day and night, the scream, muffled by pain and darkness, but recognisable in my subconscious. Zoë.